Semantic Mastery

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

In episode 159 of Semantic Mastery's weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how one can improve the rank of affiliate blogs that are stuck at the bottom of page one.

The exact question was:

3) What do you do when you have blogs at the bottom of page 1, and want them higher? I have a blog for an affiliate site that's ranking 7-8 for a big keyword. Is there anything I can do besides waiting?

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

In episode 159 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked how harmful multiple H1 tags on a page are.

The exact question was:

2) How harmful are multiple H1 tags on a page? A client site I'm just starting to work on has pages with 5-10 H1 tags. Does having a lot just hurt readability, or does Google consider it a negative factor?

Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 161. Today is the sixth of December. First one in December, we're rolling towards the end of the year but not quite there. Speaking of closer to the end of the year, we're going to have a pretty awesome Hump Day Hangout coming up later in December but stay tuned for that, we'll tell you more about that coming. Real quick, we want to go down and say hi to everybody and see how everyone is doing. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris: Looking good. It's glad to be here.

Adam: Awesome. Hernan, how about yourself?

Hernan: Good. It's actually quite warm right now in Buenos Aires. Yeah, I'm excited for what's coming. We have a lot of stuff coming. Oh, what? Are you cold?

Adam: No, I don't know. I'm perfectly warm.

Hernan: Okay, right, okay.

Adam: Hey, Marco. How's it going?

Marco: Well, the doctor took a look at my MRI today and said, “Holy shit.” Those are not words that you want to hear when the fucking doctor takes a look at your MRI of your fucking back, dude so that's what I'm doing.

Adam: All right, fair enough. Bradley, how about you, man?

Bradley: I went to a doctor once with an ear infection and it hurt like a son of a bitch. The doctor put the thing in the ear to look at it and he goes, “Whoa.” I was like, “Doc, you're not supposed to do that.” “I've never seen an eardrum look like that.”

Adam: Well, make it not look like that.

Bradley: No wonder it hurts, right? Anyway, this is great, guys. Today has been a really good day, really productive day. I got a shit ton of stuff done. I'm just excited to be here and answer some questions, and hang out.

Adam: Cool. Well, before we get into it, I got a couple of quick announcements. I'm going to post some stuff on the page. If you've never have come to Hump Day Hangouts, first of all, thank you very much for being here. It's awesome and we love having more people join us. We got some good stuff for you, some resources I'm going to post on the page for you. If you were around over the Thanksgiving time period and for Black Friday then you saw the e-mails and you saw the page we got, you know that Syndication Academy is increasing a price. It's going to be like a 50% jump. It's something we've been putting off for a long time and this is last announcement that it's happening, and the price is going up to $97 a month here shortly in seven days. We want to give everyone fair notice a nice reminder here before that happens, and you can get that for free if you join the Mastermind, all right? We want to remind people about that, that's one of the many, many perks of being a Mastermind member.

Something else we wanted to talk about, obviously there's been ongoing updates with RYSP loaded. There's been a ton of new contents, stuff going on there. I'll let Marco talk about this.

Marco: Yeah, we have in fact a new webinar coming up on Monday. We're calling it Multi-Location Domination with Automation.

Bradley: Wow.

Marco: Yes, sir. We're going there. We got in fact two scripts that we're rolling out to make things easier just to allow people to make it as simple as possible to go and take over not only their local niche, right? The local area but surrounding areas and just take shit down city by city, that's how we do it, that's what we're teaching. We're also going to show how it's done globally by the way because we're in the lab taking a look at that, and as a matter of fact, when we roll out the Multi-Location Domination webinar, we're going to raise the price on RYS reload. The price is going up. I don't know how much. You know I always push as much as possible as much as you guys will allow but price is going up. I suggest if you're on the fence, it's time to get in. Get in where you fit in or get left behind. We're going to teach people how to take over, it's really that simple.

Adam: Nice. Yeah, it'll be going up. We'll have some more information coming out about that you guys if you're watching. If you're curious, I'll also post the links obviously. If you've been thinking, “Oh, I've heard about RYS and it's neat and maybe I should do that.” One, you should, it's awesome. If not that then you should be checking out the [inaudible 00:04:05] services if you're more of the outsourcing type, but if you've been thinking about getting in, now would be obviously a great time. Before we start answering questions, I think Bradley, you had something you wanted to share with people, right?

Bradley: A couple of things, number one, go to bradleybanner.com. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and also my daily Mindset updates. I just posted another video just a few minutes ago like literally 15 minutes ago that I recorded today kind of impromptu. I wasn't planning on it but I had something that I wanted to share so I recorded a 20-minute video. I just posted it on Facebook as well as my YouTube channel. Going through those e-mails every single day, consistently every single day now, it takes me anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to write an e-mail everyday but I'm developing a habit and it's been … I can see … It's like today I wrote e-mail number 20 and I can see the results already like it's already improving my ability to write and convey thoughts better. In other words like it's a habit worth developing. I've put it off for years and finally I'm developing the habit with intention and it's working well like for example I had a bunch of VSLs video sales letter stuff that I had to record today and I had some scripts to write for some re-marketing videos and stuff.

Typically a VSL script would take me or a re-market whatever, a video script would take me hours to write but I was able to bang out three of them in about an hour's time today. I attribute that to a habit of writing that I've started to develop. I encourage you guys to do something similar even if it's journaling whatever. I'm just using the e-mail list as my vehicle. I would encourage you to go check it out because I basically talk about some pretty cool stuff as far as goal setting and mindset and that kind of thing. Anyway, that's it. I do want to tease one thing rather quickly because we're going to talk about this at the beginning part of next week's Hump Day Hangouts briefly maybe 10 minutes or so. I'm going to cover this a little bit more in depth but today I just want to tease you guys with it. Oh, also check this out. I got my Mastermind shirt on. Thank you, Adam for sending it.

Adam: That's pretty cool. Nice.

Bradley: Yeah, I meant to drop this down a little bit. There you go, how is that?

Adam: Nice.

Bradley: One of the thing, I just wanted to tease very quickly is guys the prospecting funnel stuff that I've been working on developing for a few months, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I worked on some other stuff. The last two weeks I've really been working on it hard again and it improved the process quite a bit, and the results are fucking astounding like I don't know how else to say it other than that. I'm just going to give you guys a very quick sneak peek of this and then we're going to talk about a little bit more next week. I'm not going to go into details, guys. This is more conceptual because this is going to be shared. This is being shared in the Mastermind. We are starting a new Mastermind educational track in January 2018 where we're going to be basically building two businesses throughout the year from soup to nuts, start to finish.

One is a physical business like a brick and mortar type business, it's a gym and then the other one obviously the emphasis is on the digital marketing but it's going to be more than just digital marketing, right? It's going to be traditional marketing as well as like setting up businesses, setting up a business, entity structuring, all that kind of stuff because I think that's important. As marketing consultants, we should know about this stuff anyway, right? Number two, the second business. I was going to do two local businesses but I made an executive decision last week to make our local agency that we're building right now as the second project that we're going to highlight and cover as part of the Mastermind training next year. All of these is going to be revealed in very fine detail starting in January.

In fact I've already started sharing a lot of this agency building stuff which is an automated scalable agency. The way that i should've built mine originally but you can't know which you don't know, right? I've already started sharing a lot of that in the Mastermind but I'm just teasing you guys with this to encourage you to come join the Mastermind especially if you're doing local because the results are undisputable, indisputable as far as like how well this is working on the prospecting side of things. Still working on the sale side, the fulfillment side, all of that is coming but the prospecting side is working. Enough teasing, let me just show you very quickly, I'm going to grab the screen. Guys, I'm not going to put this up for long but I want to show you something.

This is an image of the prospecting funnel. I told you I'm not going to put it up for long. I'm about to switch screens, take a screenshot fast, fast, fast. All right, moving on, that's the prospecting funnel and take a look at this for example. This is the … I'm using drip.com as our auto responder for all contractors that are being put into this funnel, this prospecting funnel. These are only people that have taken action and you can see that like … I know it's probably small on you, let me zoom in just a little bit, guys. [inaudible 00:09:08] look at just yesterday at it at 12-5 so December 5, we scroll down. We had 10 new contacts out of just yesterday alone. Those are inbound needs, guys. You guys see that? If we take a look at … Let me pull over here for just a moment.

This is our pipe drive account. This is what we're using for our sales pipe line, it's called pipe drive, it's awesome. You can see that when I share a little bit of information about this a few weeks ago. I had run 125 e-mails through the system, 25 e-mails a day for five days and we had 13 inbound leads from that which is a 10% response rate. Since that time I've increased the outbound e-mails to 75 per day, it's been about six days. We've had about another 150 e-mails go out and look we're up to 48 leads now. We had 12 so we've added 36 more leads out of 150 e-mails, guys, that's almost a 20% response rate. It's absolutely incredible what we're getting through here.

Again I just wanted to point that out because I'm really hoping that many of you guys that are thinking about joining the Mastermind or if you're doing any sort local, I would highly encourage to come join us starting in January, well now is a good time too by the way but because I'm going to be literally dissecting exactly how that's built step by step throughout the year so that by the end of the year, you could build your own automated agency if you so choose, or you can wait until we can build it for you and you can pay us and we'll build it for you. Now that's coming too but that probably won't be for at least another year. Anyways, with that said, I'm going to move on. If you guys have any questions about that specifically, come join the Mastermind, I'll be happy to answer them, all right? You guys got any comments on that before I move on?

Adam: I do. I'm [inaudible 00:10:57]. I think this is awesome.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Such a cool process because it pulls in just a ton of stuff I won't go into but just yeah, I love it. I'm excited for this.

Bradley: Yeah, me too, man.

Marco: For anyone who's new and watching this, those are people who got e-mails and contacted us back.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: It's no longer just a cold e-mail going out. Hopefully you'll be able to find some of these people contacting us and saying, “We're interested. Tell me more,” which is I mean that's just awesome so now you have a pool of people to contact.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Anyone that's new, that's what's going on. We go really in depth as you said in the Mastermind. The Mastermind is the place to be in 2018. If you're not there, you should be.

What Are The Points You Need To Convey To The Client When It Comes To Service Costing?

Bradley: Totally agree, I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you, Marco. All right, enough of that. Let's get into some questions. We've got several. I'm excited. Let's get into it. Mel, she's up. She says, “I'm sending video e-mails and it's getting some traction but when asked for price, I'm having some trouble. What kind of points do you try to convey when they ask how much does it cost.” I swear this question was asked last week. I swear this was … Anyways, how much does it cost? Now if that's the first question out of a prospect's mouth, they're probably not going to be a good client. I've experienced that many, many times. Those are price-conscious people. I understand we all are price-conscious to a degree but the problem with people that come right out of the gate with how much does it cost is it's because they have already made assumptions and all they're looking at … They look at marketing as an expense, not an investment. It's very hard to satisfy any client that thinks of marketing as an expense instead of an investment.

Marketing should create an ROI. If it creates a return on investment then it's an investment, it's an ROI. Investment is right in that title, you know what I mean? When they come right out of the gate with thinking of it as an expense and asking how much does it cost then even if you were to land them as a client, you're probably going to have difficulty with them. They're never going to be satisfied. There always going to be questioning, what's going on because they're penny pinching, right, and because they're … Again I just want to explain it, that's a red flag. For me over the years after doing this so many years, that's a red flag for me. I would recommend that when it comes down to that, I try to avoid pricing stuff upfront until after I've had the chance to talk with them and analyze like a particular property. That said, sometimes you just have to talk them up front like what it is and you're going to lose them. A lot of the times you're going to lose them but don't cut undercut your services just to try to land clients.

I get how important it is especially when you're starting out or you're trying to go to an agency because I've done it, guys like I have taken any client on that was willing to give me money regardless of my gut feeling. We've all talked about this all of my partners, all of us at [inaudible 00:14:08] had similar expenses. I'm looking forward to hearing some comments about this again in just a moment. My point is every time I've done it as well where many times over the years where I've said okay it's money I'm going to take it, and I've had a bad gut feeling and then it ends up being a nightmare. It requires so much additional work, so much hand holding, so much convincing that what I'm doing is valuable that it's just not worth it. You're better off just prospecting more clients until you find those that don't put up as much resistance or to understand that it's an investment that should produce a return on investment, excuse me, should produce a return instead of an expense.

Again when it comes down to somebody says how much does it cost, typically that's if you want to just answer him, get him out of your life like thank you very much, that's what Bill Goodin in Hot Prospects says. He says it all in one word, no spaces between them, “Thankyouverymuch” click like hang up. You know what I mean? I don't mean be a prick about it. I just mean like give him the price and let them say, “Oh no, that's too much.” Let them hang up on you then, that's fine. Don't take it personally, move on. Prospect like what I just showed you over here, fill your pipeline full of prospects and you won't have to worry about that. Does that make sense? Now I know you're doing video e-mails and I know that's a much slower process and that's why I recommend that with the video e-mails, you keep them very short because you don't want to spend … Here's the thing, Mel, when I get a get a client referral and I do a video e-mail with an analysis of their properties and stuffs, sometimes those go 20, 25 minutes long.

I'm not kidding but that's because it was a client referral so there's a much better chance of me landing that client anyways. It's a high quality lead because it was a client referral but when I'm doing cold prospecting and I'm sending video e-mails which I don't really do so much anymore because it's so time consuming. I like the shotgun approach better because you could scale it. With starting out that rifle approach of doing video e-mails is very effective but I would try to keep your initial video, your outreach video, down to five minutes or less so that you can bang out several of them within an hour and get them out because again it's a numbers game.

You might get out of sending 10, you might get three. My consistent number is worth three or four responses out of every 10 e-mails that I sent. Out of every three or four responses, I would typically get one client, sometimes two, and so again that's what I recommend that you try to keep it short. Otherwise you end up with 15 or 20-minute videos for every potential client, cold e-mail that you send and that's just way too much work. What are your comments, guys?

Hernan: I totally agree with you, Bradley in terms of the quality of the clients that you're getting. It's funny because I wasn't franker with one of the Mastermind's call like five minutes before they hang up. One thing he said really resonated with me and he was saying, “It's way easier to increase the quality of the clients that you get than to try to reeducate them into why your stuff that you're doing is worth it.” In other words, instead of trying to reeducate themselves on why they will need to take your marketing serious, and why they're doing an investment and why they should be doing and should be doing that, that puts you in a perspective of, “Well, I need now to educate them into why my stuff is valuable.” The perfect client, which is something that you need to come up with. There's nothing that … You need to come up with what's your perfect type of client, which sometimes like I would say 9 times out 10, we don't do. We just go and try to find as many clients as possible and that puts you in the position of getting the worst type of clients on earth pretty much, right?

Number one, ask yourself what your perfect type of client is and number two, try to find those clients in a way that they already understand that marketing is an investment. Bradley would tell you yeah go after the ad works guys. Go after the guys that are already advertising because they already know. Go after the guys that are doing SEO that you can actually pinpoint that they're doing SEO or they have their maps already set up. Maybe not perfect but they understand the value that ad works can bring to their business et cetera, et cetera so that's why I think it's way easier and way more rewarding. You will end up working with better clients, getting better quality and try to enhance your process of getting clients to get better quality clients than try to turn someone's minds over, which is nearly impossible and it will wear you out. You know what I'm saying? That would be my comment.

Adam: All right, I'll play devil's advocate real quick and not disagreeing actually, just offering the counterpoint and I would say that also you got to do your homework on this one. I've seen people go in and try to just sell videos. Let's say they are selling video rankings or something like that. They go in and they get to the money part and they don't know what their potential client's cost is or what their business model is and then it becomes really hard for people to talk because they don't understand or they go in with the completely wrong offer. Make sure you do your homework and find out how much is a lead work to this person. You don't have to know down to the dollar but do you know the market? Do you know how much it's worth? Is the lead worth $5 or $50? Figuring that out and then you can at least talk until it leads you to the right people.

Bradley: Yeah, and to expand on what Adam said, if you understand the market. Your potential customer base, which will be like local businesses or whatever kind. In my case like contractors, tree service contractors, right? Let's just use that as an example. I understand about how much a good tree service lead is worth to a contractor because I understand from being in that industry what a qualified lead could produce for a contractor as far as revenue. With that said, you can frame or stir the conversation into a let me show you how instead of how much does it cost, let me show you what it can produce. Does that make sense because then you're taking the cost equation. You're taking cost out of the equation, right? The focus isn't on the cost. The focus is on the return and that when you reframe their question in that light or in that manner then they start to see the return on investment potential but as Hernan said I 100% agree with him. If you have to first convince somebody as to why your service is valuable or important then before you then have to sell it to him then you're doing twice as much work because first you have to convince then you have to sell so avoid that.

If you feel like you're catching resistance where you're trying to convince them then let them go, thank you very much, click. Thank you very much, click. Get the hell out of my life. Next like SWSWSWSW, some will, some won't, excuse me. Some will, some won't, so what, someone's waiting, and that's really what it comes down to. Just fill your pipeline with quality leads. Know your market. Know the potential what a lead is worth so that you can stir the conversation towards a return on investment versus cost price. Does that make sense?

Marco: I'm reading this just a touch differently and I don't disagree with either you or Hernan but I'm more inclined with Adam. If she's having trouble understanding how to price her services, I mean that's a bit different and that's just understanding the market and what are leads worth. I mean if a guy … If a lead is worth $2,000 to that person and you can produce, you should be concentrating on what you're going to do, right? You get paid for what you produce rather than getting paid for whatever for something nebulous that the client doesn't understand. I'm going to affect your bottom line positively, that's what I'm going to do for you. As long as you take that approach, you understand the market, you understand the client. You understand what a lead is worth then you won't have trouble pricing yourself and your services, that's how I'm seeing this question.

Bradley: Yeah, and last thing, that's a great question by the way, Mel so I'm going to plus one at number one. I'm sorry we spent so much time on this, guys but that's a fantastic question. What happened? It didn't plus one. The last thing I would say about that, Mel is you can always have a foot in the door product or service that you can provide even for free, right? I don't recommend … Guys, don't work for free for often but you can have a foot in the door offer some sort of product or service that you provide for free to prove yourself to a potential client, to a prospect, that works really well like I do that. I'll talk to a potential client and I'll say, “Look, let's talk about pricing.” If that comes up then I'll say, “Let me just prove to you that I'm capable of producing some results and then we'll talk about that. This is what I'm going to do.”

A lot of times what I'll do is I'll do some video marketing campaign so I can get them some quick wins that they can see by going to search results and seeing videos ranked for various keywords, various locations whatever. I'll just do a quick … It might take me 30 minutes to set up a video campaign and blast it out using some spam tools or whatever. Get them ranked for a few keywords and then I just show them the results and say, “Look, this is what I was able to do in a few days and then imagine what I could do if you hired for this or that.” Does that make sense? You can give them something for free just to whet their appetite so to speak and then you can upsell them into or sell them into an actual service at that point you've already … You've given them results in advance.

Again video marketing is fantastic for that because it's something that you can get done very, very quickly. You can get results quickly. It's almost tangible, right? They can see the results and because of that, you can oftentimes upsell, that's why I use video primarily as my opening product or service, okay. Again, great, great question, Mel.

How Would You Optimize A Maps Listing For A Potential Client Located In The Midst Of Small Counties?

Bradley: Perfect. There you go. As far as everybody else, it's not an RYS. My suggestion in that case would be, well I'm going to give you number one, ad words, right? You can do that rather quickly and you can just set up GO targeting so it's very easy to get them to start generating traffic for all the different areas that way plus if you've got a Google My Business, you use the location extension for your ad words ad then you can actually have your maps, your Google Maps, your Google My Business Maps listing show up in Maps in the actual Maps. Now I'm starting to see the Maps listed, the first listing in the three-pack is now an ad for a lot of queries like that's been rolling out slowly but I'm starting to see that appear more and more in various industries now where there's an actual four-pack instead of a three-pack because the first listing is an ad, and that's something that you can absolutely do. All you need is a location extension, which means you need a Google My Business listings verified, and then you can use the location extension and ad words, so that's number one.

Number two would be to rank organically. I don't see a lot of value in that for local lead [inaudible 00:26:22] type of stuff. I've got mixed results on that but that's all you could do short of setting up PO boxes in all the various areas, which can be a pain in the ass, and then you've got a ton of Google My Business listings to optimize, a bunch of citations, all that kind of stuff to do. It's really up to you. I would do what Marco was talking about with RYS stuff, he's doing multi-location training on Monday but I would also consider ad words and go after some organic stuff unless you're willing and capable of setting up a bunch of Google My Business profiles listings for various locations using PO boxes or something, okay.

What Are Your Thoughts On AMP?

Marco: We have an AMP plug-in. All you have to do is go to the Facebook group, AMP Creators Mastermind in Facebook and join then download the plug-in. It's working for news more than anything else, that's where AMP really helps. It speeds up the page. A very light version of the page is served up through AMP. I think as Google goes more into mobile, it will have greater weight. It will become more important. Right now it hasn't had the impact that it should've had but that's because if you're not producing news, the Accelerated Mobile Page experience isn't really necessary. Your website is fast enough as it is or should be fast enough as it is, right? I mean that's just my take on it. We do have the plug-in so you can experiment with it and see whether it works for you, whether it has any effect in your niche. We haven't seen any effects as a matter of fact with AMP on anything local unless you produce news, something that's newsworthy like Google's going to pick up.

Bradley: Yeah. I don't have much of a comment because I haven't really played with it much.

What Do You Think Are Some Issues With Writing Blog Posts And Repurpose Them To Videos, Embeds, And Syndication?

They had I think six employees or technicians. Six plumbers that were out there working with vans and all that kind of stuff. They just go out on job site and take their phone, iPhone, Android whatever and record a very short video from the jobs that they go out on. Just say, “Hey, this is Joe from Joe's Plumbing in Fairfax, Virginia. We're out on location in Fairfax, Virginia, we got a call for a water heater that needed replaced and this what I found.” He takes his phone and shows where the water heater was. The heating element went bad, we basically replaced the water heater and now this customer has hot water again, and they're happy. If you have any water heater problems in Fairfax, Virginia, contact us at an in-call to action. Very, very simple like a 60-second video, 60 to 90 seconds, sometimes even less and then they send me the video file and then I upload it to YouTube.

I send it to a transcription service, have it transcribed then I go post the video with the transcription on the blog, which then syndicates out across the syndication network, and it gives me the ability to optimize the YouTube video and rank that for keywords like water heater repair, Fairfax, Virginia for example and as well as the blog post, which adds additional content to the site that's a 100% relevant, it's a 100% unique user or 100% created, unique created content. Does that make sense? It's a very, very good strategy because it's something that you don't even have to do like to me, it's very simple to just … They send me the video, I upload it to YouTube, optimize the videos, send that to rev.com to get it transcribed, get the transcription back within usually a couple of hours, and then I can post that as the actual post content, which has its keyword rich.

It's got the call to action and ends up going into silos so I interlink that up to the silo heading, and then that goes out across the syndication network which in turn helps to boost the overall site; very, very powerful strategy. I don't see anything wrong with that at all. I would encourage you to do it. Test with it to see. I haven't done it specifically talking about what you're talking about here but I can't imagine why that would be any different. It's a good strategy, check it out.

How Would You Sell Map Embeds To Somebody?

Muhammad, what's up, Muhammad? He's here every week asking questions and being very engaged, it's awesome. We're glad to have you, buddy. He says, “Hey guys, how would you sell Map Embeds to somebody?” You don't, Muhammad. You wouldn't sell Map Embeds unless it's an SEO or somebody that understands it. My first reaction would be don't. Don't even try to explain. I mean some people are inquisitive and you can try to explain it in a way but a lot of the times like when you start talking about that kind of stuff with prospects, their eyes glass over because they really don't understand it anyways. I try to avoid that like technical kind of stuff with most clients if possible, but anyways “I never really thought of a Map ranking as something to include in SEO [inaudible 00:32:12]. Is it something you guys would include?”

Yeah, when I'm selling SEO services, I typically for the most part am selling Maps ranking, local SEO Maps ranking for the most part but I don't particularly tell them all the different things that I'm doing to get them ranked. Not stuff like Map Embeds because they wouldn't understand like for the most part. I might tell them I'm going to produce content. I'm going to optimize your listing, your photos. We're going to create corresponding content on your website. We're going to do some link building stuff and syndicate content out across your social media properties to get you some exposure and traffic, all that kind stuff but I don't talk about Map Embeds and that kind of stuff. What do you guys think about that?

Marco: I totally agree. Don't ever sell rankings, dude, Muhammad. You cannot control rankings. If you can't control rankings then you cannot sell what you can't be sure that you're going to do. I mean you can be really good at it but then run into a stubborn niche or stubborn sub niche where you just can't rank them out, and you just sold the client on ranking them out so now what are you going to do? Sell results, guys, everyone, everyone in this. When you're out there and you're selling your services, you're going to produce results. What those results are, that's up to you. It's not up to the client to decide what the results are. The results will be reflected in the bottom line through visitors to the website, leads and close leads and all of that. How you go about it, that's what they're hiring for you the expert. Approach it that way, don't ever, ever sell rankings ever.

Bradley: I would only comment that I actually do often sell rankings. What I do is I preface. I say, “Look, I don't work for Google,” so Google can change its algorithm at any time. They're constantly adjusting your algorithm so things change but the trend is, the idea or the goal is to get you ranked in the Maps like that's what I say when I'm talking to a prospect. I say, “This is what I know works and I'm going to do this.” I don't sell them rankings but I tell them that they can expect to see some movement and we're likely going to get the goal, the end goal what my intention is to get them ranked in Maps, but what I'm selling are the services that have shown to prove that is the end result. Does that make sense?

It's like I don't say or guarantee rankings, I don't because I'm not … If I'm going to guarantee rankings, I'm going to own the asset. It's going to be lead gen thing because I'm not guaranteeing it to anybody but me but I don't guarantee rankings to clients. Unless for example I got a video production company that I do a lot of wholesale SEO for, I basically don't guarantee rankings but I tell them if we're not ranked on page one then you just don't pay for it. Does that make sense? So that's what I do, I don't guarantee rankings but I tell them they don't pay unless they're ranked. Keep moving, we got two more questions from him. We're going to try to roll through these. I know we're running short on time today already.

Bloggers are very similar because bloggers get pitched all the time on guest post and link swaps and link exchanges, all that kind of stuff as well. It could just be that, I don't know because I haven't really pitched to those kind of people but the other thing would be maybe … I'm not sure about cold e-mailing those. I would have to think about it and obviously, Muhammad, I would recommend that you just test different … You're going to have to split test your different cold e-mail approaches. What I'm doing for contractors is working incredibly well but I don't know that that method would work for YouTubers and bloggers. I would just try different types of cold outreach e-mails until you found one that seems to work well and then repeat that, scale that, right? It's going to requite some split testing on your part. It's a lot of work I know. It's a lot of trial and error but once you find something that works like what I found with the contractor prospecting that I'm doing then you can scale it and you can just see massive results, okay?

As far as when I started selling networks like when I first built, started outsourcing that and I trained some virtual assistants, and I started selling networks, I sold them retail to local businesses and then I sold them wholesale to SEO agencies. What I did was I just went to the various marketplaces like SEO Mojo was one of them, SEO Clerks was another one of them, and I just put up listings for networks to sell syndication networks, and that's how I ended up landing a lot of SEO agency clients was through those service sites by selling networks. I would sell it for like … I believe I was selling networks at the time for $297 or $299 around $300 for a single network but for agencies, I had an agency from Australia contact me and he wanted 10 per month, 10 syndication networks per month.

At the time I actually I wouldn't do it, well, I actually probably would do it now still but I ended up selling those networks at $100 a piece to him so he'd pay me $1,000 a month. I'd sell them. I have my team would build him 10 networks and my networks cost me about $50 to build so I would literally pocket about $500 to not really do a damn thing, which was awesome. You may want to consider doing that too like putting your service up on some of these sites, all right?

How Would You Explain The Benefits Of PR In Layman's Terms To A Client?

Last is, “How would you explain the benefits of PR in layman's term to a client?” Exposure, brand building and traffic, that's it. You don't sell the SEO part of it. You can mention that it should have an SEO benefit, should help them it will likely or often will help them to rank better but would you want to sell is the exposure, the brand building and the traffic that it will produce, those are the things.

You want to talk about the benefits not the features. Essentially you want to tell them how, what are the end results that a press release can provide that's traffic, authority and brand building and exposure, massive exposure. Anybody else would comment on that? All right, we're going to keep moving.

Marco: Yeah, I know. I was about to say that, yeah. I agree with you, Bradley in terms of … Business owners they all care about how many new clients, how many new leads they can get. Usually they don't care about rankings or positions or whatever like keywords and all of that jazz. If you talk about in business terms like again this is an investment, I like the different … The comparison between assets and liabilities but the way [inaudible 00:40:30] gets it. For example, you would have money that you throw away every week pretty much. You buy stuff, you go to Starbucks, you go out to dinner whatever, you buy clothes, that's money that goes out and never comes back, right? Assets and the way millionaires think is that they invest their money into stuff like real estate or stocks or whatever, now would put more money into their pockets so that's how they're thinking. Well, you can do the same because you can say this is a service that would put more money to your pocket because that will increase the visibility of your website, the traffic and ultimately if the website converts, the leads, right?

If you think about it, you're investing the money. We always backtrack to the investment versus the spending side of things so that's how I usually frame it and it works.

How Do You Get Viewers To A Niche YouTube Channel That Contains Other People's Popular Videos?

The only problem with the next part of your question is you say, “the goal is to gain viewers that I can re-target with ads.” Unless, the video is on your channel like it's your video uploaded to your channel then even if you have other people's popular videos and playlist and somebody were to click through from your playlist to that other person's video, you won't be able to re-target them because you won't get a re-marketing cookie from somebody clicking on to their video. Does that make sense? As far as I know you can't and again I may be mistaken here but I don't think you can set up a re-marketing list for videos within a playlist like I think it's only for individual videos or a channel, which in that case you can re-target them if they land on your channel, right? I'd have to go in and look at ad words to see.

I'm not going to do that right now obviously we're running short on time anyways but I'm going to be doing a lot of ad word stuff starting in January with the new Mastermind training curriculum. The first month or the first module is all about PPC (Pay Per Click) and YouTube is going to be included in that so it's something that I will probably have soon, I'll know for sure. I know that you can re-target people that interact with any videos on your channel. I don't know if that also includes other people's videos that you've embedded or added to playlist from your channel or not, I don't know. Can anybody else confirm that?

Marco: Yeah, I know. I think that is the exact same thing that you're saying, Bradley like you need to own the asset in order for Google to count the cookie towards your re-marketing list. What I would say, Eddie is see why these videos are so popular, try to emulate them, try to do the same title, keywords, et cetera, et cetera and then try to rank them on YouTube because that will put you like for example on semantic mastery channel and on my own channel, I'm pretty sure that will probably is channel two. 20% of the videos bring 80% of the views. Is that big? Is that cute? You will have, I don't know, I probably have a couple of 100 videos semantic mastery has at this point thousands of videos but only a small fraction of those videos will for some reason will get … Not for some reason but because they are really targeting really high volume keywords on YouTube, right? They're targeting really high volume keywords and they're getting shared. They're getting a lot of comments so YouTube will increase their view cap, and that will trickle down into the rest of the channel.

Here's the thing, you want to try to emulate these popular videos, record your own version, curate them whatever, and try to run them on YouTube so that you can now own the asset. Once you have that, again, you need to create a bunch of videos so that 20% of those videos will get 80% of the traffic and once you have that then you can start re-targeting those people with that. You can also do pay-per-view. You can try to use the ad words to a video, and that's something that you can do as long as you own the video. You can do with [inaudible 00:45:29] but there's absolutely zero sense on spending money to do that but the point here is that you own the video but that's a number scale. The pay-per-view needs to be lower than the re-targeting cost and that's usually not the case, right? You're paying more per view than that the ROI that you're getting when you're re-targeting these people so have that mind.

The best way to go, in my opinion, will be to get a lot of organic traffic from YouTube. Rank your videos on YouTube so that you can get a lot of organic traffic and then go to channel re-targeting.

Bradley: By the way, there are ways to siphon some authority off of those videos that are really popular that get a shit ton of views. Eddie, that way that you do that is scrape the tags from the videos that are ranking really well or that are getting a lot of views, the really popular videos. Scrape the tags. There are tools that can do that. You can also right click and view page source. Get the first two or three tags but there are tools that will scrape tags for you. Scrape the tags. Use those same tags in your video as well as the channel name of the channel that has the popular video and put that video into a playlist from your channel alongside of your other videos. In other words, when you go to optimize your own video targeting the same type of keywords as the popular videos that you want to siphon some authority from, you want to scrape the tags from that popular video, place it into your video.

You also want to scrape the channel or add the channel name as a tag in your video. You also want to create a playlist with that popular video next to your video. What happens is a lot of the times, it's not 100% of the time and I don't know what the threshold like what the circumstances are to make it work sometimes and not others but what I've seen a lot of that, when you do that is your video will end up popping on the end screen of a video when they show related videos like checkerboard of related videos. Your video will pop into there as well as in the right-hand sidebar on the watch page of the related … The right-hand sidebar where they show related videos. You'll end up popping into there and you end up getting a lot of referral traffic just because you're in the related video section if that makes sense, and that's a great way to siphon authority off of other people's videos, okay? Good question though, Eddie.

Do You Know A Tool Like Cinch Tweet From Mastery PR Intended For Linkedin?

Adam: Yeah, Jonathan. What you could do is probably hop into the group if you're not already a part of the semantic mastery, our free Facebook group and ask in there because I think Chris has been at least playing around with it so that would be the place to ask.

How Would You Reinstate The Previous Top Ranking Of A Client Site That Targets 3 Main Keywords?

Okay, yeah, Ralph, I would absolutely recommend that … I don't typically try to rank the homepage guys. I mean it happens and there's ways that you can force the homepage to rank but I usually optimize for again for contractors if they have separate services. I always like to try to optimize a specific service page for basically one primary service, right? I have separate pages for each one of those. In your case, it would be a separate page for keyword one, one for keyword two and one for keyword three because what happens is each one of those pages can be highly optimized for that particular keyword, that service in that location. It's likely that you can end up ranking that as long as there's not other domain health issues, Ralph. Assuming that everything else is fine, I would recommend that you would target specifically each keyword or service with its own page and then optimize it for that but then what you do is obviously you just internally link from each one of those pages up to the homepage.

In Maps you're usually going to rank their homepage in Maps, not always the case but usually but then for organic, you would end up ranking the individual pages based upon the keywords search query, right?

Marco: I have a question. Sorry to stop you while you're going through this but do we still have a backdoor to SEO bootcamp?

Bradley: I think we do.

Marco: Because I mean I was just going through that over the weekend.

Bradley: It's amazing.

Marco: And I couldn't stop. I went and I was lying down in bed and just listening and I went through. I forget how many videos I went through just listening. The guy is amazing on his keyword research and how to set this up. Ralph, everything that you're looking for and how to set this up, how to target the keyword whether it's a category, whether it is the top of the silo, whether it's supporting LSI and whatever, this is covered in there. I have yet to see anyone who covers on page SEO as thoroughly as what's covered in SEO bootcamp.

Bradley: Yeah, dude. He's bad ass, man. I don't know if it's … I think the $500 price is now doubled unfortunately. I think it's $1,000 now but it's worth it even at $1,000. I'm not kidding, Ralph. It's fantastic. It really is that good. If somebody didn't already drop the link, it's semanticmastery.com/seobootcamp, I believe, that will take you over to it if you want to check it out. I'm not sure if that's the link or not. If not, if somebody-

Adam: Yeah, I'm looking for it right now just to confirm.

Bradley: Yeah, that's what I would suggest, Ralph is obviously optimize a separate page for each one of those and then you can link from those pages up to your homepage, that would be the better route to go than trying to be … If you're trying to cover too many topics on one page and they're not closely related enough then you dilute the optimization of any one of the keywords if that makes sense, okay? All right, we're almost out of time, guys. Unfortunately we didn't get … Well, I guess we got the most of them.

Will A Syndicated Content About Recipe Triggers Duplicate Content Issue?

No, it won't because … Well, first of all just make sure that you are attributing. As long as you are citing the source … Okay, it won't create any content issues for you anyways regardless, okay, period but to do it legally and properly the way that you should do it ethically as well is you make sure that you are getting attribution to the source where you got those recipes. Always cite the source. Give credit where credit is due, that's not going to cost you any issues if you don't as far as SEO issues, but it can cause … You can get DMCA complaints, which are basically copyright infringement complaints. If one of those bloggers decided that you were infringing upon their intellectual property, and they decided do a DMCA complaint then Google can de-index that page or post and that's a bad sign for you and it's a bad sign for the domain. I would recommend that you just you are always linking back to the source.

You can no-follow the links, that's what I do. No-follow them but make sure that you link back to the source and give them the credit where it's due, okay?

Should You Link Back To The Original Post Or Just Cite Them On The Syndicated Blog Post?

Question two, “Is it enough to cite their blog in the bottom of my current recipe without …” No, I would always link back to it, always. If you're worried about passing dues, no-follow the link, okay? “As I link back to it, cite their blog at the bottom of my current or should I also link back to their original post?” Yeah, always link back to the original source of the content that you're curating, that's essentially what you're doing. You're curating content which is perfectly legit, that's how most of the content is produced for all of my blogs, and client blogs and lead gen sites and all that is through curation. There's nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that you cite the source.

By the way when you're curating content, guys, sometimes you're still going to get people that are pissed off about it, which is dumb in my opinion but sometimes because you are providing them a link, potential exposure, potential traffic but you are giving credit where it's due. I still have gotten some cease and desist, take-down notices type stuff from curating, it happens from time to time. It's just part of the game. Just don't freak out when it happens. “I'm asking this because they all link to different pages on my site in their recipes. This would be some sort of reciprocal linking, I guess, which I heard is not good.” No, it's fine. In that case, in this particular circumstance, that's absolutely fine because it's not like you're trying to gain for SEO. You guys are just cross-promoting because it makes sense, it's relevant. It's not an SEO thing, right? I mean it provides SEO value but the intent is not strictly for SEOs. Does that make sense?

Reciprocal linking was something that was a no-no years ago. I don't know if it's still considered a no-no in Google's eyes because there is a lot of crosslinking between and co-citation and things like that now. I'm talking about old directories, guys. A lot of web directories, they would only publish your link if you put a widget in the footer that linked to their directory. Those are reciprocal links that are frowned upon but two bloggers cross-promoting each other's post, that's not really … I don't work for Google so I don't know but I can tell you it's logical for that to not be a reciprocal link penalty type thing. Any comments on that, guys?

Marco: Yeah, I haven't been doing a lot of reciprocity like reciprocal links lately so I wouldn't … I don't have data like recent data.

Which Should You Get First, RYS Stack Or Syndication Network Or Both?

Bradley: All right, we're almost out of time. Fortunately we got through almost all of the questions. Harold asks, “Hey guys, what's up? Quick question, should I get an RYS stack, a syndication network or both?” Well, my go-to answer is going to be both. Of course, Harold. No, I mean that for real. I always start with syndication networks is always standard operating procedure but as soon as that gets built, I order the RYS drive stack as well, but it is really standard operating procedure, so I would say yes to both. Any comments, guys?

Marco: No, absolutely. Set up your syndication network, prime it just like we teach in the syndication academy. Once that's done, get the RYS stack going and link to everything in T1. I mean it's really that simple, and you can power everything up through link building through your drive stack, which will protect your T1, and your money site.

Which Company Provides The Best Citation Services?

Bradley: All right, Dan says, “Hey, gents. What are your suggestion for best source to have citations done?” Serpspace of course, Dan, duh. Dan, I'm giving you a hard time but yeah Serpspace. You can go in there and like … If you're looking for the Cadillac, the Ferrari of citations, you're going to spend more money but they are fabulous. They are done very, very well. I would say Loganix, they've got some really good packages. Semanticmastery.com/loganix but for new sites typically, I would just go with what we have in Serpspace and just order the big citation directory sites, which is like the national type sites and then I try to go with the hyper local type citations, which are a lot more like niche specific or local specific type directories. Those are always like standard operating procedure.

I usually start right off the bat with new sites with about anywhere between 40 to 60 citations, which is about 20 or so of the big national directories like the big heavy hitters, Yelp and Angie's List, Yellowpages that kind of stuff, and then we try to find … We scrape citation or directory sites that are either niche specific or more localized and then build the additional citations there. Also don't forget, Dan, to order citations or aggregate listing submissions like New Stark Louise. What are the other ones? Info USA, several of those. The other one is Factual is one. The other one is Axiom. Those are all really good because you get listed in those and about three to six months later, you'll have citations and a ton of different directories because other directories scrape or pull data from those, and create listings for you. It's more of a long-term thing but you want to do that right upfront because in about six months you'll start seeing a whole bunch of new citations start popping up and you didn't have to build them or create them.

All right, last question, I know we're right at the five o'clock mark, “Is Cinch Twitter good for tier one? Can it be used on the Twitter attached to RSY stack?” Honestly, I have no response for that because I don't even know what Cinch Tweet does. Anybody else have an answer to that?

Adam: No, I don't. Good one to hop in the group probably and ask there.

Bradley: All right. We're done, guys. Oh, wow. Everybody else bailed out. Thanks, everybody for being here. We'll see everybody else next week, I guess because we don't have any other webinars this week, do we?

Saturday, December 9, 2017

In the 159th episode of Semantic Mastery's weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how much power a network would lose if a Tumblr account was not included.

The exact question was:

I'm having problems getting Tumblr to send me an email verification for one of my syndication networks. Assuming I can't get that straightened out, how much power would my network lose if I don't include a Tumblr account? Would it be better to set up a Tumblr account for this network using a different email address (such as my Outlook email instead of my Gmail)?